A new species of Merothrips from the Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram, India (Thysanoptera, Terebrantia).

Merothrips mizoramensis sp.n. is described from northeastern India based on a single macropterous female. The fore wings of this specimen have a single longitudinal vein, the pronotal notopleural sutures are very long with the posteroangular setae displaced laterally, tergite IX lacks trichobothria, and many tergites and sternites bear an unusual number of sculptured lines.

A Novel Internet of Things Framework Integrated with Real Time Monitoring for Intelligent Healthcare Environment.

During mammogram screening, there is a higher probability that detection of cancers is missed, and more than 16 percentage of breast cancer is not detected by radiologists. This problem can be solved by employing image processing algorithms which enhances the accuracy of the diagnostic through image segmentation which reduces the misclassified malignant cancers. By employing segmentation, the unnecessary regions in the breast close to the boundary between the breast tissue and segmented pectoral muscle can be removed, therefore enhancing the accuracy the calculation as well as feature estimation. In-order to enhance the accuracy of classification, the proposed classifier integrates the decision trees and neural network into a system to report the progress of the breast cancer patients in an appropriate manner with the help of technology used in healthcare system. The proposed classifier successfully demonstrated that it achieved more accurate prediction when compared with other widely used algorithms, namely, K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine and Naive Bayes algorithm.

Redescription and lectotype designation of Gynaikothrips microchaetus Ananthakrishnan & Jagadish (Thysanoptera: Phlaeothripidae).

Gynaikothrips microchaetus Ananthakrishnan and Jagadish (1969) was described from Dharwar in Karnataka, and until now has been known only from southern India (Ananthakrishnan & Sen 1980). The original description was based on an unspecified number of syntypes, with no depositary indicated. However, one of the authors (R. Varatharajan) acquired four slides that are labelled by Ananthakrishnan as this species and bear the same collection details as given in the original description. These are assumed to be syntypes, and one female is here designated as lectotype. The other three slides are of males and are considered as paralectotypes. Further, during extensive surveys for thrips at Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram (23.320 N 92.130 E) and Manipur University campus (24.820 N 93.900 E) during 2014-18, we have collected both sexes of this species from the leaves of Ficus curtipes. The freshly collected specimens were mounted onto microscope slides in Canada balsam, and identified using the keys provided by Ananthakrishnan and Sen (1980). Hence, the species is illustrated and re-described with additional features, based on the type material together with freshly collected specimens from north eastern India, Manipur and Mizoram. The following abbreviations are used for pronotal setae: am-anteromarginals; aa-anteroangulars; pa-posteroangulars; ml-midlaterals; po-postocular; epim-epimerals; abdominal tergite IX setae S1, S2 & S3-setal pairs I, II and III respectively (S1 nearest the mid-line).

Internet of Things with Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform for Remote Health Monitoring of Abnormal ECG Signals.

In this paper, MODWT is used to decompose the Electrocardiography (ECG) signals and to identify the changes of R waves in the noisy input ECG signal. The MODWT is used to handle the arbitrary changes in the input signal. The R wave's detctected by the proposed framework is used by the doctors and careholders to take necessary action for the patients. MATLAB simulink model is used to develop the simulation model for the MODWT method. The performance of the MODWT based remote health monitoring system method is comparatively analyzed with other ECG monitoring approaches such as Haar Wavelet Transformation (HWT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Sensitivity, specificity, and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve are calculated to evaluate the proposed Internet of Things with MODWT based ECG monitoring system. We have used MIT-BIH Arrythmia Database to perform the experiments.

Public, patient and carers' views on palliative and end-of-life care in India.

AIM: To systematically review the existing evidence on the Indian public, patient and carers' perspectives on palliative and end-of-life care. BACKGROUND: With a growing population of terminally ill people across the world, there is also an increasing awareness among international health policy makers of the need to improve the quality of life for terminally ill patients. Understanding service users' (patients, family and public) perspectives is crucial in developing and sustaining successful community-centred palliative nursing policies and service models especially in countries like India with diverse population. METHODS: An integrative review was performed on five databases, using hand searches of key journals and reference citation tracking for empirical studies published in English from 1990 to 2015. A thematic analysis framework was used to analyse and identify key themes. RESULTS: Analysis of the six eligible studies revealed five themes. Themes describe how social, economic, cultural, religious, spiritual and traditional factors influenced the palliative and end-of-life care perspectives and experiences among Indians. They also illustrated preferences relating to place of care, as well as benefits and challenges of family caregiving during the last days of life. CONCLUSIONS: Although we found minimal evidence on user perspectives, nurses need to aware of those unique components of context-specific palliative and end-of-life care practices in India - socioeconomic, cultural and religious factors - on their nursing encounters. Nurses need to advocate same in policy development to enable accessibility and utility of palliative and end-of-life care services, which are scant in India. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING AND HEALTH POLICY: Nurses can be central in gathering the contextual evidence that advocate users' perspectives to inform further studies and national palliative care policies in India. Emerging policies in nursing education need to focus on integrating family-centred palliative and end-of-life care within curricula, whereas nursing practice may promote nurse-led community models to address the patchy palliative and end-of-life service provision in India.

Relationships and revised status of Nagathrips (Thysanoptera: Phlaeothripinae).

The generic name Nagathrips was erected as a sub-genus of Mesothrips for the single species, crenulatus Varatharajan and Singh (2000). Subsequent studies revealed character states that were not included in the original description. These are: prosternal basantra absent; antennal segment III with one slender sense cone, segment IV with three similar sense cones; fore wings parallel-sided with no median constriction. These character states are not found in any species of Mesothrips, a genus of the Tribe Haplothripini (Mound & Minaei 2007), but are typical of members of the Liothrips-lineage (Dang et al. 2014). To confirm such a relationship partial sequence data of the mitochondrial gene (CO1) was obtained and compared with that of Gynaikothrips species.

A new species of the genus Thrips (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) from the Western Ghats of India.

Thrips laurencei sp.n. is described from specimens collected on flowers of Hydrangea macrophylla in Western Ghats range of Tamil Nadu, India. This new species shows sexual dimorphism in colour, with the females brownish yellow with brown shadings but the males uniformly yellow.

Analgesic and antipyretic effects of Sansevieria trifasciata leaves.

The ethanol and water extracts of Sansevieria trifasciata leaves showed dose-dependent and significant (P < 0.05) increase in pain threshold in tail-immersion test. Moreover, both the extracts (100 - 200 mg/kg) exhibited a dose-dependent inhibition of writhing and also showed a significant (P < 0.001) inhibition of both phases of the formalin pain test. The ethanol extract (200 mg/kg) significantly (P < 0.01) reversed yeast-induced fever. Preliminary phytochemical screening of the extracts showed the presence of alkaloids, flavonoids, saponins, glycosides, terpenoids, tannins, proteins and carbohydrates.

Cross infectivity of baculovirus, Spilarctia obliqua nuclear polyhedrosis virus against mulberry pest, Porthesia xanthorrhoea Kollar.

Spilarctia obliqua nucleopolyhedrosis virus (SoNPV) has been found effective against S. obliqua (Walker) as well as Porthesia xanthorrhoea Kollar. LC50 concentration of S. obliqua SoNPV against S. obliqua and P. xanthorrhoea was 2.5 x 10(4) and 3.7 x 10(4) POBs/ml, respectively. LT50 of SoNPV against S. obliqua was 5.73 days, while it was 6.98 days for P. xanthorrhoea. Cross infectivity of SoNPV against P. xanthorrhoea and ease of its mass production may make it an ideal biopesticide.